History Podcast and Blog

Today marks the 50th anniversary that humankind put a man in space. Everyone is writing about this online. I mean everyone. This is your one stop shop for everything online that is Gagarin. Jalopnik, a car blog, even has an extensive feature on their blog. National Geographic has a huge slideshow with really fantastic photos you need to check out. Boing Boing posted the below video with a link to NASA’s website where there is a feature on Gagarin too. Gizmodo did a great job with their article online too, maybe the best one I read today. Wired did a post about the photos that were altered of some of the soviet astronauts. Google of course jumped in and created a custom image for Gagarin.

Yuri Gagarin carried two personal items with him on his historic first spaceflight. First, cognac. Second, shark repellant. The shark repellant was in case he landed in the sea. Mary Roach via Twitter

Then there is the movie. Metafilter mentions it on their site. We touched on it briefly a few posts ago. The best site to learn about the movie is GeekDad. I’ll post the movie below.

Here is a new category on the blog. Movie reviews! So, Christian (a long time supporter of the website and podcast) sent me a link to an article about the astronaut Vladimir Komarov. So I was reading this and thought really? I guess I wasn’t the only one because quickly after the original post the put up another post addressing all the questions the first one created in the comments section.

So, now we don’t know what happened at all. But one of the comments on another site, I think digg, but I’m not sure said that the whole thing was debunked in the documentary In the Shadow of the Moon. So I rented this from Netflix and they didn’t mention a single thing about Vladimir Komarov. Totally bummed, but on the bright side it was a really good documentary that featured interviews with American astronauts. So, it wasn’t a total loss.

And as mentioned in the NPR articles there is a book coming soon that may unveil some of the questions that we are seeing pop up. I myself, would really like to know what happened. Hopefully, Starman: The Truth Behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin will provide some answers, or at least give us some interesting history. In the mean time I think I will break out some blu-rays that I have had for a while but have not had the chance to watch, When We Left Earth – The NASA Missions [Blu-ray]. Anybody see this yet?

Oh, and one more thing, on April 12, there is supposed to be a film coming out on youtube that will tell us more. See the link here.

Email Signup

Subscribe to our mailing list

What’s This?

Historyonair.com is the online home of the History Podcast. You can find history related articles, video, and audio files here. You can contact the author of this blog and its content at historypodcast@gmail.com.